


don't leave me hanging on like a yo-yo

by firstaudrina



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Billy's dad is an asshole, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Friendship, Gen, Physical Abuse, Pre-Relationship, baby bi who doesn't know she's bi yet, post-season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-26 17:22:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19772911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: The first letter Max sends El is written in alternating lines of electric orange and neon green ink, with fruit-scented stickers and stick figure drawings of Diana Prince.





	don't leave me hanging on like a yo-yo

**Author's Note:**

> Set after Season 3.

The first letter Max sends El is written in alternating lines of electric orange and neon green ink, with fruit-scented stickers and stick figure drawings of Diana Prince. _Will could probably draw you a better one_ , she adds sheepishly. But she doesn’t know if El will go to the comic store to get the new issue, or if there even is a comic store by her new place, and Max doesn’t want her to fall behind. 

El writes back in the exact same style, down to the pen colors, but her handwriting is blocky and big, unlike Max’s crabbed scrawl. _Hard to read_ , El declares. _But I got it_. She also includes a drawing of Wonder Woman by Will, though Diana has red hair instead of black. _I made him_ , El says, and Max likes to imagine a proud tinge to her voice.

Max switches to pink and purple next. She writes about how much it sucks to be stuck with all boys again, that she broke up with Lucas because he ate the last slice of pizza even though she had clearly called dibs, and that Mike’s moping stopped being cute three weeks ago.

_Still cute_ , El says in purple, with a cheery smiley face drawn beside it. Max makes a face at the lined paper. It’s all curly at one edge from being torn out of a spiral notebook. 

_Gag me_ , Max replies.

They don’t just write. Max waits until her mom and stepdad are asleep before creeping into the living room on socked feet and dragging the phone back into her bedroom. She shuts the door on the cord and watches the clock, waiting for exactly 11:53 to pick up the receiver before it rings. It would be bad if Neil heard. He’s starting to miss his favorite punching bag.

“How is Hawkins?” El asks in her careful way. She never wastes a word; her lips find every syllable, the roundness of the _w_ and sharpness of the _k_. The boys always know when Max has just gotten off the phone with El, because allegedly she’s picking up the same way of speaking.

“Ugh,” Max groans, and launches into a whispered spiel about everything that happened at school that week. They have to limit their calls to twice a week because they never get off the phone until after 1 a.m. and Max is grumpy with sleeplessness the next day. 

El doesn’t have to whisper, but she does because Max does. She tells her about the speech classes she’s taking and the writing exercises she has to do, the gold stars she gets on math quizzes and how she bombs all her spelling tests. Max didn’t need anyone to tell her that. She’s got the letters to prove it.

They spell words back and forth at each other. “Just between you and me, I think it’s over with Lucas. O-v-e-r, L-u-c-a-s.”

“You dump him all the time,” El says. “T-i-m-e.”

“I know, but, like, three strikes, you’re out,” Max says, then has to press pause on spelling to explain baseball for twenty minutes. She and Lucas are on their seventh strike.

“Three strikes, you’re out,” El sighs when Max is done. “S-t-r-i—”

“K-e-s,” Max finishes. She hears a creak in the kitchen. “Gotta go!”

In her next letter, El changes the ink to blue and magenta. Max’s stomach turns over in a weird way like it does when she aces a new trick on her skateboard. She’s proud that El didn’t wait for her to pick new colors. It’s stupid, but it feels like a big deal. 

El also includes a handful of Polaroids. _Joyce gave me a camera_ , she writes. _Now you can see where we live!_ She punctuates the sentence with a holographic She-Ra sticker.

There are five pictures in total. One of El grinning on her bed, surrounded by stationary and schoolbooks, then another of Will standing sheepishly by a bus stop, hand in his much-longer hair. The third of Joyce’s back while she stands at the stove. One of the front of the house. The fifth of El blowing a kiss. 

Max gives the picture of Will to the boys, but sticks the ones of El up in her locker. “Come on,” Mike wheedles. “Give me one, you have _two_. One of those was definitely supposed to be for me!”

“Get your own,” Max tells him, and ignores the swoop of jealousy she feels a week later when Mike smugly pins his own Polaroid of El to the inside of his locker door. 

Her mom and Neil won’t let her go up to visit on Thanksgiving because it’s their first one without Billy. Instead, Max has to sit stiffly at the dinner table in a black dress, across from Neil’s racist mom, and listen to them talk about Billy like they never even met him. Max once saw Neil grind Billy’s head into the wall. She could hear the shouting and slammed doors at night. When she was home, it felt like her shoulders were always up by her ears in a perpetual wince. Now she sees Neil’s crocodile tears and wants to spit at him across the table. Billy was a bad person, but he didn’t get it from nowhere. 

Because Max can’t visit El, she gives her present to Mike to pass along. “Tell her she can open it before Christmas,” Max says. “I’m gonna want to check her progress by then.”

It’s a skateboard. Max trusts El to figure it out.

El’s call interrupts Thanksgiving dinner, a shrill ring cutting through Granny Hargrove’s extended prayer. Max just _knows_ without really knowing, so she’s out of her seat and grabbing for the phone before anyone can tell her not to. She doesn’t even care. She presses the phone so tight to her ear that it hurts, wishes she could press herself through the spiraling wire until she comes out the other side.

“I smashed my head into the sidewalk!” El announces happily. “We went to the emergency room and I got three stitches.”

“El!” Max exclaims with hushed delight. “I’m gonna have to send you a helmet next.”

“ _You_ never wear a helmet.”

“Yeah, well, I’m an expert.”

“I’m a superhero,” El says, quick and teasing. Max’s giggles transform into a furious yowl as the phone is yanked out of her hand.

Neil is terse, red-cheeked. “What part of ‘no calls during dinner’ did you not understand?”

Max is momentarily fearless. “I’ll see you soon, El!” she shouts a second before the receiver clicks back into place. Neil gives her a push, not hard, back towards the table. But it’s a push.

_I gotta get out of here_ , she writes to El, in red. Some nights she sneaks out, bikes to Lucas’ house, and crawls in his window. He gives up his bed for her and sleeps on the floor. They don’t get back together, but he listens.

_Come here_ , El demands in response. _Share my room_. When she’s emphatic, sometimes she forgets full sentences. 

Max smiles. _Okay_ , she writes back. _Will you make me a fort?_

_Don’t need one. But if you want_.

Now whenever Neil is pitching a fit, Max will picture a life in El’s far away bedroom: getting ready for school together, doing homework side by side on the floor, listening to cassettes, ratting their hair up for dances. She and El dissect this imaginary scenario late at night, or in letters with full color doodles. 

“You will teach me to skate,” El says, though she promises she’s getting better on her own. No more head injuries, at least.

“And I’ll help you work on getting your powers back.”

“We can fight with swords. Like Amazons.” El is ambitious. 

“But no boys are allowed on the island,” Max says firmly.

“No boys allowed,” El repeats, solemn. “A-l-l-o-w-e-d.”


End file.
